Shape Computation Lab

The way that the lab approaches modeling in design is radically different from past and current approaches including all current geometric, parametric and generative modeling approaches in computer-aided design.

The work at the lab builds on the shape grammar formalism and the ways it has theorized a new way of computing that foregrounds the visual over the symbolic, but significantly extends it to provide a new formal description, the shape signature, a uniform characterization of shape that can be used to calculate and visually represent all possible shapes made up of points, lines and arcs in CAD parametric models and a new shape grammar interpreter, the Shape Machine, designed from scratch in the lab on the reworking of the fundamentals of shape search.

Current projects deal with design automation, visual programming, intelligent CAAD systems, formal specification of shape and style, all foregrounding the visual – and computational – basis for design in spatial systems. The work draws upon relations with other disciplines at Georgia Tech including mathematics, computer science, cognitive science and philosophy.

Shape Machine CAD Demo

A series of three video vignettes showcasing simple and yet astonishing visual tasks in CAD workflows that the Shape Machiedoes effortlessly. In the first vignette a designer or an estimator counts instances of objects on the fly without requiring specially prepared drawings by some proprietary software. In the second vignette a designer edits a detail in a drawing and wishes to repeat the same process for all identical instances. In the third vignette a designer restructures a flat drawing in different layers to change its organizational structure.

People

The Shape Computation lab consists of a group of designers, computer scientists, and engineers dedicated to the study of shape and its leading role in design, design automation, visual programming, and intelligent CAAD systems.[more]

Athanassios Economou, PhD

Yichao Shi, M.Arch, MS.Arch

Russell Newton, MS CS

News

Invited talks, presentations, paper releases, software releases, classes, awards – and everything else that pertains to the daily life of the lab

2024 

ARCH 6508/ CS 6492 / ID 6508 Shape Grammars @ Georgia Tech 
Thanos Economou will teach the Shape Grammars course during Fall 2024. The course has UG/GR numbers and will be held on M/W 2:00 pm – 3:15 pm at the Success Center 152, GT campus. 

Shape Machine 1.0.8 release 
A new release of Shape Machine is available at the Georgia Tech ShapePoint site featuring marquee lasso selection, carrier line and arcs intersection points registration, and a much-improved runtime calculation for shape embeddings. 

Shape meets Euclid @ AiC 
Economou, A., TK Hong, Russell Newton. (2024). “Shape meets Euclid: Integrating shape computation with ruler and compass procedures”, Automation in Construction, Volume 165, 2024, 105562, ISSN 0926-5805, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.autcon.2024.105562. First Online: 28 June 2024. 

Best Design Computation Paper Award @ DCC'24 
Russell Newton received best design computation paper for his presentation “Redefining Line Maximization in Shape Machine at the DCC'24 Conference, July 9, 2024. 
[more]

Featured Shape Grammar Projects

A handful of representative projects at a variety of scales and media including analog ones executed by pencil and eraser, three-dimensional Froebel blocks, and fully automated scripts in DrawScript in Shape Machine.
[more]

Palladio Computatus

Portm-ino Automated

The Atrium Hotel Grammar

The Dirksen Variations

Mughal Gardens Redreamed

Terragni's Riddle

Shape Machine Symposium @GT

The symposium presents the current state-of-the-art of the Shape Machine, a new computational, visual and disruptive technology, to leading experts in various fields including AI, engineering, computer science, mathematics and design to review, discuss, and envision the field of shape cognition and computing at Georgia Tech.
[More]

Featured Back to the Future Studio Projects

The Shape Machine Studio is the current iteration of a series of computational design studios built upon formal research on design languages and their ability to address specific constraints, programs and contexts. The Back to the Future Studio iteration of the Shape Machine studio takes on Jean-Nicholas-Louis Durand’s emphatic and obsessive propositions in his 1802 Précis of the Lectures on Architecture and uses them as a platform to inquire and test their claims, conventions and expressiveness and to ultimately elicit a constructive response by each student in the form of a design proposition embedded within current theories and practices of architecture.
[more]

Theater Rules

Market Hall Grammar

Recent Publications

A handful of recent journal articles, book chapters and conference proceedings. The complete series is available at the Publications entry of the lab. [more]

Shape Machine

The Dirksen Grammar

Artificial Intelligence-Aided Design

Paperless Grammars

From Shapes to Topologies and Back

Promises of Shape Grammars

CourtsWeb

Designs emerge among the interrelations of symbolic descriptions including drawings, models, diagrams, renderings, texts, numbers and other symbolic data. Among them, the visual properties of the 2D and 3D geometric models – plans, sections, elevations, axons, perspectives, exploded axons and so forth, at all scales, views and combinations, and their different functionality in design workflows, including figure-ground diagrams, circulation diagrams, adjacency diagrams, visibility diagrams, lighting diagrams and so forth, provide an inexhaustible canvas for formal studies in the analysis of artifacts at all scales, from the object, to the urban frame. Courtsweb is a visually-driven, custom-made database designed and implemented in-house to foreground the formal description, interpretation and evaluation of the federal courthouses in the US.
[more]

Courtsweb III

Courtsweb II

Courtsweb I

Interested in the lab? In our Shape Machine?

If you are interested in joining the Shape Computation Lab as an undergraduate or graduate assistant for paid or for credit work please fill out the form below. If you are interested in our Shape Machine and you are a member of the Georgia Tech community, please fil out the respective form too.

Shape Computation Lab

Seminars

Study Abroad